The outpouring of grief has continued well into Monday, as even those who didn't know Swartz well (myself included) are shocked that someone so young and talented could feel so much pressure from the justice system that he would be compelled to take his own life. One computer engineering student, John Atkinson, wrote an eloquent post on Sunday that Swartz' death has been on his mind over the last few days—even though he didn't know Swartz personally, nor had he heard of Swartz prior to the arrest.

Aaron Swartz is what I wish I was. I am a bright technologist, but I’ve never built anything of note. I have strong opinions about how to improve this world, but I’ve never acted to bring them to pass. I have thoughts every day that I would share with the world, but I allow my fears to convince me to keep them to myself. If I were able to stop being afraid of what the world would think of me, I could see myself making every decision that Aaron made that ultimately led to his untimely death. This upsets me immensely. I am upset that we have a justice system that would persecute me the way it did Aaron. I am upset that I have spent 27 years of my life having made no discernible difference to the world around me. Most of all I am upset that Aaron’s work here is done when there is so much more he could have accomplished.

Swartz's funeral will be held in Highland Park, Illinois on Tuesday, January 15, 2013 at 10am CST—many tech luminaries, family, and friends are expected to be in attendance.

Update: A new petition asks the White House to remove Ortiz. "A prosecutor who does not understand proportionality and who regularly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges to extort plea bargains from defendants regardless of their guilt is a danger to the life and liberty of anyone who might cross her path," it says, in part. It currently has 17,000 of the 25,000 signatures needed to secure a response.

Would the Government have dropped these charges if he was still alive? Of course they wouldn't. To drop them now after his death is disgusting. They should have dropped them before whilst he was alive.

I am involved in academia, it always bemuse me how journal publishers can profit on the works of us researchers. I understand there needs to be some fee charged for maintaining editorial staffs, but not at the cost of several hundreds of dollars for a paper download.

When a paper is submitted, fellow researchers in the field look over the papers for academic rigour and this is called peer review. Peer reiewers get no pay, we do most of the heavy lifting ourselves, at minimal cost to the journals. Not many people know, there are no profit sharing for paper authors on any proceedings earned from paper downloads, Journals keep it all. We are only in it for the fame and contribution for the name of science. Universities pays a lot of subscription fees to this journals, I always wonder where the money goes.

Some lesser known journals, most online only (no paper publications), even charge authors several hundred of dollars to publish their paper. I wonder, what is the point.

Personally, I would have thought it a bit odd for them to continue prosecution.

:-D

However, given the issues at stake, and given that the person in question can not be hurt any further, it is almost as though they should proceed with the questions at hand.

*EDIT*

Good grief, people, I'm not saying they should continue investigating what he did, or what term he should get here, or that the thing was ever right in the first place. I was just saying that, well, now that no one can be hurt, it's almost a shame that they close the door on discussing the issue of open access, until the next time someone does something like that and gets nailed to the wall. Because then that person can be hurt.

For all the violent reactions to the prosecution that are taking place here, the second tragedy of it all is that it is in vain. Instead, we'll need a second victim before it can be discussed in courts again.

I could be wrong, IANAL, but I imagine they drop charges when someone dies pretty regularly. What's the point of trying to send a dead guy to jail? Only situation I can think of is where there is serious financial shenanigans, they might be able to recover monies from the persons estate.

That's not to say that the charges were fully justified. Hopefully the over-eager prosecutors will learn from this.

Well, I'm sure that made Aaron Swartz's day. This would make Inspector Javert proud.

As a lawyer, this kind of idiotic prosecutorial overreach is infuriating. Prosecutors have a great deal of discretion in who they charge but it only works when the prosecutor shows decency and common sense. Exercising restraint and discretion are part of the job, too. None of that is evident in the conduct of the Boston federal prosecutors. Some public accounting - no matter how useless it would be - is needed. If anyone cares to sign, I started a White House petition to open a DOJ investigation into this fiasco:

Would the Government have dropped these charges if he was still alive? Of course they wouldn't. To drop them now after his death is disgusting. They should have dropped them before whilst he was alive.

To drop them after his death is not disgusting, it is required, as the constitution requires him to be present at his trial, and that's no longer possible.

I agree he should not have been charged, and I'm sure dealing with the charges contributed heavily to his decision to end his own life. I don't agree with that decision either, as I have a great deal of respect for his decision to try and free knowledge and wish he would have lived to enjoy the free-er more knowledgeable world he was striving for.

Would the Government have dropped these charges if he was still alive? Of course they wouldn't. To drop them now after his death is disgusting. They should have dropped them before whilst he was alive.

To drop them after his death is not disgusting, it is required, as the constitution requires him to be present at his trial, and that's no longer possible.

I agree he should not have been charged, and I'm sure dealing with the charges contributed heavily to his decision to end his own life. I don't agree with that decision either, as I have a great deal of respect for his decision to try and free knowledge and wish he would have lived to enjoy the free-er more knowledgeable world he was striving for.

Is it sad that part of me actually thought the government would go and try him anyway?

Would the Government have dropped these charges if he was still alive? Of course they wouldn't. To drop them now after his death is disgusting. They should have dropped them before whilst he was alive.

To drop them after his death is not disgusting, it is required, as the constitution requires him to be present at his trial, and that's no longer possible.

I agree he should not have been charged, and I'm sure dealing with the charges contributed heavily to his decision to end his own life. I don't agree with that decision either, as I have a great deal of respect for his decision to try and free knowledge and wish he would have lived to enjoy the free-er more knowledgeable world he was striving for.

Is it sad that part of me actually thought the government would go and try him anyway?

Well since the point of a trial is to bring someone to justice it makes a trial in this case pointless.

Oh how nice of the fucking assholes. THIS IS NOT OVER! #JusticeForAaronSwartz #AaronSwartz #AaronSw

Yeah? What are you going to do? What will you do against the alpha sociopaths who have the power and the law and the guns behind them? Going to DOS their site? Release some mildly embarrassing emails of low level functionaries? Gonna rock the vote? Replace the red lizard with the blue lizard?

If he was still alive the charges would still be pending. They only dropped the charges because there is no one to charge since he is now dead.

It was a pointless announcement since you cant punish a dead person. They probably announced it to rub salt in the wounds of his loved ones. I look at the government as a soulless monster. They don't do good deeds for good reasons.

As a complete aside, the talk here of a posthumous trial sort of reminds me of the trial of Pope Formosus.

His corpse was disinterred, clad in papal vestments, and seated on a throne to face charges of perjury. The verdict was that the deceased had been unworthy of the pontificate and all his acts were declared invalid. The papal vestments were torn from his body, the three fingers from his right hand that he had used in consecrations were cut off and the corpse was thrown into the River Tiber.

The body was retrieved by a monk and eventually reburied in Rome. Then about 100 years later, the body was disinterred again, tried again, found guilty again and this time it was beheaded.

I am involved in academia, it always bemuse me how journal publishers can profit on the works of us researchers. I understand there needs to be some fee charged for maintaining editorial staffs, but not at the cost of several hundreds of dollars for a paper download.

You're an academic that faces a charge of several hundred dollars for downloading one paper? Which journal is this? Or are you quoting in non-USD? Every publisher I've run into charges 10-30 USD for a single paper.

Can the prosecutors be charged for mental torture that lead to the suicide of Aaron? This resembles closely to cyber bullying or schoolyard bullying.

Mental torture? Are you kidding me ?Having depression does not award you a "get out of prosecution free" card.Might as well charge the friends and family who knew he was suicidal -- it was on his damn blog! -- for not getting him the help he needed. That's only slightly less ridiculous than your over-the-top idea.

What are you talking about? I don't think anyone is petitioning to have him elevated to sainthood. It's a current news item, this is a tech site, he was a tech pioneer and activist. He's dead, the news just broke, this is the comment section on an article about him where people post related comments and the like. Some people want to remember him, they make memorials, blogs, whatever. Pretty simple or so I thought.

You're conflating a moment of reflection with elevating someone to sainthood. Seems odd to me, even a bit extreme. But maybe I'm confused, so how should this moment in time be handled? What's the appropriate amount of empathy or reflection for you, without it being seen as deification? It must be a fine line indeed.

Sensationalism at its best. Man is no hero. He didn't even release the papers he downloaded. All he did was make some headlines and kill himself. Martyrdom is not a good use of one's life, it doesn't solve anything.

MIT, The Massachusetts AG and JSTOR deserve the DDoS'es, web page takeovers and whatever the hell else happens to them over that. Especially JSTOR. Locking out academic knowledge behind a paywall is disgusting and a contributor to world poverty.

All this vitriol built up against government prosecutors (who were clearly in the wrong let me point out) and not one word about two other major points to this story:

1: MIT refused to back down once the owner of the data asked them to.

2: He suffered from depression. So it wasn't JUST the prosecution here. But that does point out the lack of compassion that prosecutors have, and the unforeseen consequences of going after someone with too much zeal without understanding the damage they could do.

Can the prosecutors be charged for mental torture that lead to the suicide of Aaron? This resembles closely to cyber bullying or schoolyard bullying.

No. It's called prosecutorial immunity and it has been strengthened to the extent that even what most people would consider misconduct (hiding evidence by quote unquote poorly trained junior prosecutors) has been affirmed as ok by the U.S. Supreme court.

For anyone who has been on the wrong side of the government - administratively or in court - your fualt or by clerical error, the government is in control the entire time. They designed the system, they live it. To be a brilliant engineer or hacker is not enough. The amount of legal conventions and standards and procedures is beyond comprehension. You are then forced to use a lawyer who may not "get it". When hackers and engineers do their work they do it in practical terms, and the law is nothing practical. And when the hole force of government is against you, well that's a giant oil tanker and you are but a dinghy.

You're dead, so we don't want the expense of housing your body. We accept your guilt plea. Thank you for thinking of the taxpayer by killing yourself, saving both the expense of the trail and your subsequent incarceration.

Suicide is always a mess for all concerned. I think that the next time Justice Department officials run red lights they should automatically be slapped with 30-year felony court dates prosecuted in Federal court. Wonder how many of them would make it to trial?

Be that as it may, Aaron Swartz is the person who killed Aaron Swartz. Case closed--nobody else to blame. I have absolutely no doubt at all that Swartz was told on numerous occasions by any number of people who ought to know that he only had to "hang on" and he'd come out "smellin' like a rose." Had he stayed the course he'd have emerged a celebrity as opposed to a statistic. I don't think there's any question but that Swartz was a) mentally ill and b) a danger to himself and others. Seems like the entire mental health profession let down Swartz in this particular venue--he'd have been much safer in protective custody. But so-called "mental health" professionals have been remiss many times in recent years and with tragic results. All we have to celebrate here is the dubious delight that Swartz didn't try and take half a city block with him. Everybody let down Swartz--not the least of whom was Swartz himself.

Can the prosecutors be charged for mental torture that lead to the suicide of Aaron? This resembles closely to cyber bullying or schoolyard bullying.

No. It's called prosecutorial immunity and it has been strengthened to the extent that even what most people would consider misconduct (hiding evidence by quote unquote poorly trained junior prosecutors) has been affirmed as ok by the U.S. Supreme court.

And they wonder why nobody trusts the judicial system anymore. Actually, scratch that... they probably don't wonder, they just don't care. Our "justice system" is as f'ed up as it could possibly be, at least on the civil side of things. I've seen it first hand several times.